Word: marat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Marat Sade thus presents a dual challenge to its cast--they must portray both lofty historical figures and loonies at the same time. The actors attack this problem with great skill, capturing the madness and hysteria of France's Reign of Terror as well as of the grimmer episodes of the 20th century. Directed by Maja Hellmold, this Marat/Sade suceeds in drawing us into an asylum that is a microcosm of our own crazy world...
Belle-Linda Halpern, who plays Charlotte Corday, the fiery young woman who stabs Marat to death is at the same time a groggy somnambulist who can barely wield a knife: she shuffles about in circles and slumps to the floor while delivering impassioned soliloquies. Funny yet frightening, pitiful yet majestic, Halpern's performance is haunting. Christopher Moore is the "lucky paranoiac" who gets to play Marat. Suffering from a skin disease, the feeble and pinched looking Marat crouches in a bathtub. His fervent speeches sound simultaneously noble and pathetic as he bleats them in a madman's wavering voice. Although...
...play, Evrard sees her production turn into a fiasco. When Marat is stabbed, the passions of the inmates erupt. They assault one another, pummel away at the nuns, rush at the bars which separate them from the audience and clamor for freedom. This is how the mob acts when it rises up in revolution. We are all maniacs. Weiss seems to say, and society is our asylum...
This idea of human savagery is further reinforced by Richard Peaslee's songs. Set to lilting tunes resembling those of Kurt Weill's, the words are as bitterly ironic as Brecht's. Throughout Marat/Sade, the singers repeat the refrain: "Marat we're poor/And the poor stay poor,/Give us a rise and we don't care how,/Give us a revolution...now!" The link between mass revolt and sexual lust is the theme of another rollicking song: "And what is the point of a revolution/But general copulation?" On the word "copulation", the singers perform a neatly-choreographed little wind...
...INMATES' extravagant lunacy, however, obscures part of Weiss's political message under a barrage of pranks and gibberish. A post-World War II dramatist, he aims his satire of the Reign of Terror at 20th-century political folly. Too often, however, the patients of Charenton drown out Marat's speeches with their rumpus of wild cheers and spiteful taunts...